Anybody Home? An insightful article from Adbusters, originally printed in Harpers.

If 20-century science can be said to have a single icon, it is the Atom.As depicted in the popular mind, the symbol of the Atom is stark: a black dot encircled by the hairline orbits of several smaller dots. The Atom whirls alone, the epitome of singleness. It is the metaphor for individuality. At its center is the animus, the It, the life force, holding all to their appropriate whirling station. The atom stands for power and knowledge and certainty. It conveys the naked power of simplicity.

But the iconic reign of the Atom is now passing. The symbol of science for the next century is the dynamic Net.

The icon of the Net, in contradistinction to the Atom, has no center. It is a bunch of dots connected to other dots, a cobweb of arrows pouring into one another, squirming together like a nest of snakes, the restless image fading at indeterminate edges. The Net is the archetype displayed to represent all circuits, all intelligence, all interdependence, all things economic and social and ecological, all communications, al democracy, all groups, all large systems. This icon is slippery, ensnaring the unwary in its paradox of no beginning, no end, no center.

The Net conveys the logic of both the computer and nature. In nature, the Net finds form in, for example, the beehive. The hive is irredeemable social, unabashedly of many minds, but it decides as a whole when to swarm and where to move. A hive possesses an intelligence that none of its parts does. A single honeybee brain operates with a memory of six days; the hive as a whole operates with a memory of three months, twice as long as the average bee lives. Although many philosophers in the past have suspected that one could abstract the laws of life and apply them to machine, it wasn’t until computers and human-made systems became as complex as living things – as intricately composed as a beehive – that it was possible to prove this. Just as a beehive functions as if it were a single sentient organism, so does an electronic hive, made up of millions of buzzing, dim-witted personal computers, behave like a single organism. Out of networked parts – whether of insects, neurons or chips – come learning, evolution and life. Out of a planet-wide swarm of silicon calculators comes an emergent self-governing intelligence: the Net.

I live on computer networks. The network of networks – the Net – links several million personal computers around the world. No one knows exactly how many millions are connected, or even how many intermediate nodes there are. Like the beehive, the Net is controlled by no one; no one is in charge. The Net is, as its users are proud to boast, the largest functioning anarchy in the world. Every day hundreds of millions of messages are passed between its members without the benefit of a central authority. In addition to a vast flow of individual letters, there exists between its wires that disembodied cyberspace where messages interact, a shared space of write public conversations. Every day authors all over the world add millions of words to an uncountable number of overlapping conversations.

They daily build an immense distributed document, one that is under eternal construction, in constant flux and of fleeting permanence. The users of this media are creating an entirely new writing space, far different from that carved out by a printed book or even a chat around a table. Because of this impermanence, the type of thought encouraged by the Net tends towards the non-dogmatic – the experimental idea, the quip, the global perspective, the interdisciplinary synthesis and uninhibited, often emotional, response. Many participants prefer the quality of writing on the Net to book writing because Net writing is of a conversational, peer-to-peer style, frank and communicative, rather than precise and self-consciously literary. Instead of the rigid canonical thinking cultivated by the book, the Net stimulates another way of thinking: telegraphic, modular, non-linear, malleable, cooperative.

A person on the internet sees the world in a different light. He or she views the world as decidedly decentralized, every farflung member a producer as well as a consumer, all parts of it equidistant from all others, no matter how large it gets, and every participant responsible for manufacturing truth out of a noisy cacophony of ideas, opinions and facts. There is no central meaning, no official canon, no manufactured consent rippling through the wires from which one can borrow a viewpoint. Instead, every idea has a backer, and every backer has an idea, while contradiction, paradox, irony and multifaceted truth rise up in a flood.

A recurring vision swirls in the shared mind of the Net, a vision that nearly every member glimpses, if only momentarily: of wiring human and artificial minds into one planetary soul. This incipient techno-spiritualism is all the more remarkable because of how unexpected it has been.

The Net, after all, is nothing more than a bunch of highly engineered pieces of rock braided together with strands of metal or glass. It is routine technology. Computers have made life faster but not that much different. Nobody expected a new culture, a new thrill or even a the new politics to be born when we married calculating circuits with the ordinary telephone; but that’s exactly what happened.

There are other machines, such as the automobile and the air conditioner, that have radically reshaped our lives and the landscape of our civilization. The Net (and its future progeny) is another one of those disrupting machines and may yet surpass the scope of all the others together in altering how we live. The Net is an organism/machine whose exact size and boundaries are unknown. All we do know is that new portions and new uses are being added to it at such an accelerating rate that it may be more of an explosion than a thing. So vast is this embryonic Net, and so fast is it developing into something else, that no single human can fathom it deeply enough to claim expertise on the whole. The tiny bees in a hive are more or less unaware of their colony, but their collective hive mind transcends their small bee minds. As we wire ourselves up into a hivish network, don’t expect, don’t understand, can’t control or don’t even perceive. That’s the price for any emergent hive mind.

At the same time the very shape of this network space shapes us. It is no coincidence that the postmodernist arose as the networks formed. In the last half century a uniform mass market has collapsed into a network of small niches – the result of the information tide. An aggregation of fragments is the only kind of whole we now have. The fragmentation of business markets, of social mores, of spiritual beliefs, of ethnicity and of truth in itself into tinier and tinier shards is the hallmark of this era. Our society is a working pandemonium of fragments – much like the internet itself.

People in a highly connected yet deeply fragmented society can no longer rely on a central canon for guidance. They are forced into the modern existential blackness of creating their own cultures, beliefs, markets and identities from a sticky mess of interdependent pieces. The industrial icon of a grand central or a hidden “I am” becomes hollow. Distributed, headless, emergent wholeness becomes the social ideal.

The critics of early computers capitalized on a common fear: that the Big Brother brain would watch over us and control us. What we know now of our own brains is that they too are only networks of mini-minds, a society of dumber minds linked together, and that when we peer into them deeply we find that there is no “I” in charge. Not only does a central-command economy not work; a central-command brain won’t either.

In its stead we can make a nation of personal computers, a country of decentralized nodes of governance and thought. Almost every type of large scale- governance we can find, from the body of a giraffe, to the energy-regulation in a tidal marsh, to the temperature regulation of a beehive, to the flow of traffic on the internet; resolves into a swarmy distributed net of autonomous units and heterogeneous parts.

No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility space that computers have created indicates they are not the beginning of authority but its end.

In the process of connecting everything to everything, computers elevate the power of the small player. They make room for the different, and they reward small innovations. Instead of enforcing uniformity, they promote heterogeneity and autonomy. Instead of sucking the soul from human bodies, turning computer-users into an army of dull clones, networked nature of our own brains and bodies – encourage the humanism of their users. Because they have taken on the flexibility, adaptability and self-connecting governance of organic systems, we become more human, not less so, when we use them.

Kevin Kelly is the senior maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its executive editor until 1999. Kelly was published and editor of the Whole Earth Review and authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and Out of Control. He is currently editor and publisher of the popular Cool Tools, True Film and Street Use websites. This article first appeared in Harper’s magazine, May 1994.

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Mel

With a propensity for lenghty internal monologues, I have come to realize that nothing is new but merely appropriated from something else. There are no new ideas. Although this fact alone may be the source of eternal despair for any creative person, it is both humbling and inspiring. All I can aim to be is a maker - a maker of things; a maker of visual casseroles.